He saw the future splendid, and roseate. He thought, with a smile, of Ferrol. Ferrol could not check him now. He had made his own identity, he was conscious of his own will to achieve that which he set out to do. Besides, there was such a difference between Lilian and Elizabeth.
He emerged from the house, a new being in a new world, living in the amazement of the last hour.
It seemed strange to him that, with such a change in his life, the old work should proceed unaltered: he stood in Rivers' room, listening to Rivers' talk and banter as the news-editor gave him his work to do; he came before Selsey at night, copy in hand; he mingled with the reporters in their big, bare room, talking of the day's paper, and discussing their jobs and their troubles with them; he came into that close, personal contact with men whom he knew, and men who knew him, and yet there was always an abyss that divided his two lives.
So it was with all of them: in their friendship they seemed to say, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no further"; their homes, their private sorrows and eager hopes, the real lives that they lived, in fact, were left behind them with the closing of their house-door, and they came to the office different beings.
Those matters that touched their innermost lives were never discussed. Occasionally, the birth of a baby in the home of a reporter or a sub-editor would bring a queer suggestion of humanity and ordinary life into their affairs: sometimes, the news would filter through of a wife seriously ill in some home at Herne Hill or Wimbledon, and there were solicitous inquiries (Ferrol would send down the greatest specialist in one of those deep, generous moods of his), for the rest they displayed no interest in each other's private affairs.
As a matter of fact, it was assumed, by the law of the Street, that they had no private lives of their own. It is impossible to imagine Humphrey saying: "If you please, I am engaged to be married, may I have the evening off," if at seven in the evening anything from a fire at the docks to the kidnapping of a baby occurred.
Therefore he told no one of the new wonder that had come into his life, not even Tommy Pride, who, by the way, had of late taken to sending out for a glass of whisky and soda, and doing his work with the glass before him on the table. They looked at each other in the reporters' room, and sighed, "Poor old Tommy."